Good morning. CIOs of some companies that use commodity swaps are waking up to unexpected news: the CFTC issued new rules Tuesday governing records retention for any company that uses swaps for financial speculation. Saving a copy of every email, phone call and instant message is usually a special world of pain reserved for banks and brokerages, and companies using swaps to hedge against price fluctuations expected to be spared. CIO Journal has the story.

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Macs running wild in the office. CBS Interactive CIO Peter Yared tells CIO Journal the company is replacing Windows PCs with Macs across the company, and Cisco says 25% of its employees now use Macs. The Apple computers are still far in the minority, but 46% of companies now issue Macs to employees, up by half in just two years, according to Forrester.

Clorox using Facebook to woo customers. “In IT, we’re scrambling to figure out how to advise the business on how to chart a brand new model,” Clorox CIO Ralph Loura tells CIO Journal. Undaunted by the dot-com misadventures of Webvan and others who tried selling household goods to consumers online, Clorox wants to rewrite its 99-year old history and establish for the first time “a direct relationship with the consumer.”

Blue Cross big data pilot will have repercussions for all. A subsidiary of the health insurer is using data analytics to scour the health records of 110 million people in hopes of improving diabetes care and reducing costs. With the cost of diabetes care expected to rise from $200 billion in 2010 to $500 billion in 2020, significant cost savings or improved health outcomes would have enormous repercussions not only for U.S. health care, but for CIOs of other businesses tempted by the promise of this technology.

How strategic are you? Long-time senior IBM technology executive Irving Wladawsky-Berger examines the evolving role of CIOs from internally and operationally focused to more external- and strategy-focused.

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

New Nokia phone opens the door for Windows. The Lumia 900 is launched at a time when BlackBerry is on a serious decline and neither iOS nor Android are rolling out many new business features. The Windows ecosystem includes 70,000 apps, a fraction of its rivals’, but they include many useful native Windows business apps like Lync, a business-friendly IM service, according to ZDNet’s Andrew Brust. But none of that matters unless “influencers” get on board, and that’s still a long ways off.

CIOs should also pay attention to compatibility issues with Windows 8 — one CIO beta-testing Windows 8 internally tells CIO Journal those issues haven’t been resolved. The new Microsoft OS holds a lot of promise, but not if internal developers have to create different versions of their apps for Windows 7 and Windows 8.

EU investigates Motorola patents. The European Union’s antitrust regulator said it will investigate accusations that Motorola is unfairly wielding certain patents covering tasks like Internet connectivity and Web video. Companies are supposed to license so-called “standard-essential” patents on a “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” basis, the Journal’s Frances Robinson explains. But Apple and Microsoft say Motorola’s prices are too high. The commission’s move mirrors an investigation launched by the EU into whether Samsung Electronics is using similar patent practices against Apple.

‘We are the cloud’ Oracle CFO and president Safra Catz is pretty gung-ho about business – cloud products are ready to roll and “engineered systems are going like gang-busters,” she tells tech analyst Jason Maynard in a Forbes Q&A. “We spend $5 billion on R&D. It isn’t about marketing and pretty ads. Our customers buy our products because they’re better.”

Yahoo swings the ax. Yahoo is expected to lay off about 2,000 workers today – 14% of its work force as it struggles to cut costs. But the cuts are just the tip of the iceberg, says AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. It will likely shed its ad tech and search businesses and is evaluating other businesses.

Apple at $1,000 a bushel. A Piper Jaffray analyst predicts that Apple shares will hit $1,000 in 2014, making it the first company to have a $1 trillion market capitalization, reports Marketbeat’s Steve Russolillo.

Emerging economies to spur IT spending. Research firm Gartner says that emerging countries will spend $1.22 trillion on IT this year, in both business and consumer spending. Asia Pacific countries account for almost half the figure, with Latin America, led by Brazil, claiming another third. “Now you understand why executives at large tech companies like Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems get so excited when they talk about places like Brazil, India and elsewhere,” writes AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl.

ARM Holdings targets mobile payment security. The company behind many smartphone chips says it wants to create a security standard for online transactions on mobile devices and game consoles. ARM will team up witha French-based digital security company and German-based technology company, reports the WSJ’s Jessica Hodgson and Lilly Vitorovich.

BlackBerry maker accommodates iPhone and Android devices. Research in Motion launched new software that helps its business customers manage Apple and Google’s Android devices on the same servers once reserved for RIM products like the BlackBerry smartphone, MacDailyNews reports. The software, first announced in November, comes as RIM continues to lose market share in the enterprise market.

Dell extends buying streak. A day after snagging Wyse Technologies, the PC maker bought Clerity, a company specializing in migrating apps from legacy mainframes to servers. The move indicates Dell’s interest in competing with likes of H-P and Oracle for contracts from larger companies, analyst Ray Wang tells Computerworld‘s Chris Kanaracus.

SugarCRM raises $33 million. Long the darling of the open source movement, the Web-based customer-management application vendor says it’s going after market share in the large company space. The new financing will help, but so will a renewed emphasis on more useful functionality and a de-emphasizing of “Open Source as a differentiator,” writes ZDNet’s Paul Greenberg.

Former VMware exec may launch infrastructure service. Derek Collison, VMware‘s former CTO and chief software architect, plans to launch his own commercial version of Cloud Foundry — an open source platform-as-a-service project initiated by VMware in 2011 — sometime in the next six months, writes Paula Rooney at ZDNet.

Hit me, I’ll hit you back—Silicon Valley version. Several weeks after Yahoo slapped Facebook with a patent lawsuit, the social media giant has swung back. In a counter-claim filed Tuesday, Facebook accused Yahoo of infringing upon 10 Facebook patents touching on photo-sharing, advertising and content optimization. Facebook CEO “Mark Zuckerberg does not like being poked by new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson very much, especially on the eve of a $100 billion IPO,” writes Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.

EVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW

Groupon’s troubles: Groupon is hit with the inevitable lawsuit from a shareholder claiming that it misled investors about its business performance before its IPO, Bloomberg reports. “Groupon’s internal controls were so poor and inadequate that Groupon’s reported results were not reliable,” investor Fan Zhang alleged in a complaint filed in federal court in Chicago. Separately, the company agreed to settle a class-action suit over expiration dates on its coupons for $8.5 million.

Romney on a roll. Mitt Romney scored three wins last night: Maryland, D.C. and the biggest prize, Wisconsin. His victories are expected to push him past the halfway mark on the way to the 1,144 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, the Hill says. Rick Santorum says he’ll keep on fighting. But Politico’s Jonathan Martin says the sharp verbal warfare between President Obama and Romney yesterday prove that the primary season is “really, truly over.”

Verizon déjà vu. AT&T’s 40,000 wireline employees are inching closer to a strike. They’ll walk off the job on Sunday if a new contract agreement isn’t hammered out. AT&T has been preparing, though, training nonunion managers to step in for workers who are out on the picket line, the WSJ says.

US Airways touts merger benefits. US Airways is telling AMR creditors that a merger could produce about $1 billion in additional revenues and around $500 million in mostly non-labor cost savings, the WSJ reports. It’s pushing hard for a deal and the next step could be to persuade the unions that workers could benefit from the higher revenues through “less-drastic contract concessions than AMR is seeking.”

The factors that render the electrical grid vulnerable to cyber attack are strikingly similar to the cyber risk issues faced by health care, financial services, and other industries. But one recent malware campaign targeting utilities shows just how exposed the grid remains to cyber threats.